Mayor Katie Wilson has been less specific in her proposals than Mamdani, but she also emphasizes that warm collective spirit, and talks about what Democrats see as their best topic: “affordability.”

She wants to tackle homelessness with different tactics:

During her campaign, Wilson criticized the previous administration’s “Unified Care Team,” saying it “chases them around the city at great expense to all of us.” She pointed to the JustCARE partnership, which “resolved” large encampments during the COVID emergency by providing shelter and wraparound services. Wilson pledged to restore and scale up that model.

Good luck with that. In the many years I used to spend a lot of time in Seattle (when Gerard lived there: 2006 to 20014, and then visits every few years after that), I saw the homelessness problem in that city grow enormously. Now I read that there’s been a 26 percent increase in homelessness in Seattle since 2022. And, because Seattle has been run by Democrats for over fifty years (the last Republican mayor left office in 1969), you better believe that the previous “solutions” came from the liberal side.

Now the socialists will get a chance.

NOTE: I don’t know whether you agree with me, but it seems that Seattle’s socialist Katie Wilson and New York’s socialist Cea Weaver somewhat resemble each other. Here’s Wilson and here’s Weaver.

The post There’s another socialist mayor in the US who just took office appeared first on The New Neo.

On Friday, the new mayor named Ali Najmi to chair his Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, which picks judges for family and civil courts and interim appointees for criminal courts; Najmi is big on making the bench more “diverse.”

Mamdani outright ordered the committee to find more diversity picks and to get public defenders and other anti-prosecution types more involved in judicial selections: Expect the city’s courts to become even more eager to put criminals back on the streets.

But what sounds even worse is this character:

The day before, [Mamdani] picked Cea Weaver to run his Office to Protect Tenants: She’s a proud radical who has called for the city to force private landlords out of business so it can seize their buildings; that’s partly why she praises his rent-freeze plans as likely to “deepen the crises” in the housing marketplace.

She’s spent years advocating unabashed Marxism: “Elect more Communists,” ran a tweet from December 2017; “Seize private property,” another in June 2018.

Plus this one:

Ramzi Kassem will serve as City Hall’s chief counsel; he recently defended Columbia University protest leader Mahmoud Khalil and before that an al Qaeda terrorist who pleaded guilty to planning a major terrorist attack on a French ship.

As a student at Columbia in 1998, Kassem wrote an article blaming “European Jews” for all the problems in the Middle East; he was a top Biden adviser on immigration, when the main policy was to let everyone in, no questions asked.

Perhaps Tucker Carlson could become press secretary. He’s already auditioned for the job:

“Is the incoming mayor a fan of Israel? Does he want America to fight its wars? Not particularly. But a Jew hater? That’s a different conversation. We’ve never seen anything to suggest he falls into that ugly camp. Because he doesn’t,” Carlson wrote.

He noted that Mamdani rejected that he was antisemitic during the campaign, but said it didn’t keep people from “slandering him as some sort of dark force plotting to install the Fourth Reich in America’s largest city.”

NOTE: Speaking of Mamdani, I was wondering what he’s said about Maduro, and I found this weaselly answer from his campaigning days:

The post Mamdani’s rogues gallery of appointments appeared first on The New Neo.

This was the context in which Walz said it:

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz … made these comments last week on the “White Dudes For Harris” fundraising call.

“Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values. One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness,” Walz said.

Another quote from Nice Guy Walz on the same occasion:

Here’s the great news: how often in 100 days do you get to change the trajectory of the world? How often in 100 days do you get to do something that’s going to impact generations to come? And how often in the world do you make that bastard wake up afterward and know that a Black woman kicked his ass and sent him on the road?

And you know that’s something that guy’s going to have to live with for the rest of his life.

Grandiose much? “Trajectory of the world” and “generations to come” – forget four years. And of course, “that bastard” is Trump and Harris is the black woman kicking his ass.

Re socialism, I guess Walz has never read Kundera. Or maybe he has, and thinks these prospects would be great (both quotes are from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting):

… human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of har­mony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.

Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise– the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.

The post Notes from Chairman Walz: “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness” appeared first on The New Neo.

This year’s study showed increased favorability of the term ‘socialism’ (49%) among Gen Z compared to 2019 (40%). Opinions of capitalism declined slightly from 2019 to 2020 among all Americans (58% to 55%), with Gen Z (ages 16-23) slightly up (49% to 52%) and Millennials (ages 24-39) down (50% to 43%). 35% of Millennials and 31% of Gen Z support the gradual elimination of the capitalist system in favor of a more socialist system.

It also showed growing concern for Donald Trump as president, especially among younger generations of Americans, with 34% of Gen Z and 35% of Millennials seeing him as the greatest threat to world peace, up 8% and 7% from 2019, respectively. This sentiment held true regarding his handling of the pandemic as well, with 39% of Gen Z and 32% of Millennials believing Trump is more responsible for COVID-19 becoming a pandemic than Xi Jinping of China. Opinions of America’s inequality grew markedly from 2019 with 68% of Americans thinking that America’s highest earners don’t pay their fair share. Among these Americans, 57% of Gen Z and 60% of Millennials favor a complete change of our economic system away from capitalism — a 14% and 8% increase from 2019, respectively.

“It shocks the conscience that more Americans today believe the U.S. President is a bigger threat to world peace than the most brutal dictators in the world, and that four-in-ten Americans believe that their country is a ‘racist’ nation,” says Marion Smith, Executive Director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. “This represents a total failure of our education system, not just in schools but also a basic dishonesty in our media and popular culture. When one-in-four Americans want to eliminate capitalism and embrace socialism, we know that we have failed to educate about the historical and moral failings of these ideologies.”

A few reminders:

The post Socialism is doubleplusgood appeared first on The New Neo.

The Gramscian march has borne fruit, because (based on a poll from last year that has age-related data on the same subject), it seems this is an age-dependent phenomenon:

Americans aged 18 to 29 are as positive about socialism (51%) as they are about capitalism (45%). This represents a 12-point decline in young adults’ positive views of capitalism in just the past two years and a marked shift since 2010, when 68% viewed it positively. Meanwhile, young people’s views of socialism have fluctuated somewhat from year to year, but the 51% with a positive view today is the same as in 2010.

Older Americans have been consistently more positive about capitalism than socialism. For those 50 and older, twice as many currently have a positive view of capitalism as of socialism.

That’s probably because older people went to school back when socialism wasn’t praised to the skies, and also because they not only learned more about history and economics and civics, but older people have done more observing of the course of human events.

Here’s the full data, where you can see the Democrat vs. Republican breakdown, which is profound. 70% of Democrats think socialism would be good for the country vs. 13% of Republicans (and who are these mysterious socialist Republicans, by the way?). Also note that the margin of error of the poll is plus or minus 6%, which is quite large.

Then there’s this:

Additionally, while a majority of Democrats view socialism positively, that is not a major change in the eight years Gallup has tracked this metric. The major shift over this time has been the reduced rate of Democrats who now view capitalism positively (47%).

So the majority of Democrats are high on socialism, and this has been going on for at least eight years. It also represents not so much an increase in approval for socialism as an increasing disdain for capitalism.

But ignorance is also part of it, because it’s unclear that those lauding socialism have a clue what it actually is. They seem to be confusing it with “equality”:

Previous Gallup research shows that Americans’ definition of socialism has changed over the years, with nearly one in four now associating the concept with social equality and 17% associating it with the more classical definition of having some degree of government control over the means of production.

Combined with this increase in ignorance is an increase in confidence in one’s state of knowledge. It’s a common combination, I’ve found:

While 51% of U.S. adults say socialism would be a bad thing for the country, 43% believe it would be a good thing. Those results contrast with a 1942 Roper/Fortune survey that found 40% describing socialism as a bad thing, 25% a good thing and 34% not having an opinion.

Now only 6% have no opinion.

Dunning-Kruger effect, anyone?

The post 4 in 10 Americans think socialism would be good for this country appeared first on The New Neo.

Despite images showing some military members in support of Guaidó, Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro said he had spoken with military leaders that showed “total loyalty.” Maduro had not been seen in public as of Tuesday afternoon and its unclear where he is located at the moment.

Guaidó, meanwhile, addressed crowds in different parts of Caracas, rallying citizens to take to the streets. “Today it is clear to us that the Armed Forces are with the people and not with the dictator,” Guaidó told a crowd in Altamira.

Historically, in situations such as this, the support of the armed forces is always key. Dictators rely on force, and if that force turns on them, they’re generally finished.

From John Bolton:

We see this now is a potentially dispositive moment in the efforts of the Venezuelan people to regain their freedom which we fully support..We think it’s still very important for key figures in the regime who have been talking to the opposition over these last three months to make good on their commitments to achieve the peaceful transfer of power from the Maduro clique to interim President Juan Guiado.

And there’s this:

MSNBC reporter Kerry Sanders unwittingly made the American case for the Second Amendment during a report Tuesday on the political upheaval in Venezuela.

Anchor Andrea Mitchell introduced Sanders for his report by commenting on the surprising ability of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro to stay in power, despite the pressure on him to step down.

“Not only hanging on but he appears to still control the military,” Sanders said. “You have to understand, in Venezuela gun ownership is not something that’s open to everybody. So if the military have the guns, they have the power and as long as Nicolás Maduro controls the military, he controls the country.”

As long as Maduro controls the military, the people have little power.

Here’s an article that goes into why economic engineering such as that of Venezuela is not going to have good outcomes:

So many people enamored with long-debunked theories had high hopes that for Venezuela — despite the enormous historical and empirical evidence to the contrary — the promise of socialism would work and would not lead to the loss of liberties or drive the once-prosperous nation into poverty. Looking back on the 20th century, we should turn to some of the most prominent thinkers who lived under similar conditions and dissected their experiences for us to learn from. Venezuela’s crisis is a good example of harsh lessons learned by one generation but forgotten by the next.

In 1944, Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom that tyranny inevitably results when a government exercises complete control of the economy through central planning. Over half a century later, beginning with Hugo Chávez’s revolution, Venezuela began its own road to serfdom by expropriating thousands of businesses and even entire industries. The more fortunate companies left before it was too late, while the businesses that remained were handed over to the Venezuelan military, under whose oversight they were neglected into ruins. In a typical demonstration of class warfare, the government publicly vilified these business owners as unpatriotic, greedy lackeys of American interests, claiming that Venezuela’s poverty had been a direct result of their existence.

Chavismo created an atmosphere of distrust in which no one felt safe enough to invest in Venezuela. More important, the courts were no longer the place to get redress. Since 1999, the Venezuelan judiciary had been systematically stacked with judges loyal to the executive. Twenty years after socialism took hold of the country, Venezuela has hit rock bottom on every possible development index. Today, 90 percent of Venezuelans are living below the poverty line and inflation rates exceed 1 million percent. Record numbers of children are dying from malnutrition, and nearly all of the country’s hospitals are either inoperative or in critical need of basic medical supplies. Frequent nationwide power outages have left, at times, up to 70 percent of Venezuela in darkness. Chávez’s socialist agenda purported to be in service of the entire nation, but as Hayek reminds us, “the pursuit of some of [the] most cherished ideals . . . [produces] results utterly different from those which we expected.”

Has anyone noticed whether those celebrities and politicians touting the wonders of Venezuela’s Chavez and then Maduro have commented on recent developments there?

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